


A Dream of Foxes

by nyctanthes



Series: Prompt Ficlets [7]
Category: Monstress (Comics)
Genre: 3 Sentence Ficathon, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship, Gen, POV Kippa, POV Second Person, wicked girls saving themselves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-02 04:07:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19433608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyctanthes/pseuds/nyctanthes
Summary: You are fox.





	A Dream of Foxes

**Author's Note:**

> A draft of this was originally written for the 2018-19 Three Sentence Ficathon hosted on DW by rthstewart, in response to a prompt from rthstewart: _Wicked girls saving themselves_. 
> 
> Fic title comes from the Lucille Clifton poem [A Dream of Foxes](https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/lucille-clifton/a-dream-of-foxes/).

You are fox. Wary and watchful.

“She’s going to kill you. Even among the Cumaea, Sophia Fekete is known for her knives. I never want to see those knives.”

She does not say this to you - Ilsa the Slaver, with her heart-shaped face and dead, blackthorn eyes. She says it to the girl with the dark hair and curled mouth. The one whose body says human but whose name says different. The angry one.

You are afraid. You cannot remember a time when you were not.

The angry girl, though, is not afraid. She does not even feel the need for pretense.

She taunts their captor. “Is that why you enslave children?” 

She issues wordless demands, “say hello to your daughter.” Demands that are met not with fists to the face, but with eye-rolls of weary aggravation and a shared cigarette. 

The wagon creaks and judders over cobbled streets. The iron that circles your neck, that lashes you to the bench on which you huddle is all that keeps you from hitting the floor. The grimy, stretched-thin canvas is a piss-poor shield against the midday sun, the sounds of freedom.

Against your left shoulder, wings tremble. In your right ear, the one-eyed boy chants broken, empty prayers: _We’re going to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. We’re going to die_. He shared a scrap of bone with you, once.

From her, nothing but a steady, beating drum. _Kill, kill, kill_.

********

You are fox. Inquisitive. Instinctive.

Placed in a circle of metal and stone: chains for your mattress, bars for your pillow.

You cannot see her. You do not need to.

Strongest is the noisome stench that emanates from the newcomers: cooling urine and colder sweat. Portents of what is to come. They mingle with the pungent aromas that define the long-termers’ insanity: feces smeared over walls and combed through hair; blood painted on the walls of their cages.

From her, you smell none of this. Instead, the metallic bite of the collar around her neck is mixed with aromas of funeral pyres and scorched earth; the sounds of buzzing wasps and teeth grinding themselves to stumps. Layered under those smells, under those sounds, faint so faint, is something you cannot identify, though you know the smells and sounds of everything. It is dry and coiled, restless and wanting. You catch, as if on a strong breeze that abruptly starts up only to just as suddenly fade away, the scent of dust whipped through the air. It coats your nose, eyes and lips - _cracked and parched, never seen rain_.

As if in a dream, you hear distant whispers and entreaties - _commands_ \- in a language you do not understand. Except for this. _Kill, kill, kill_.

You listen as a newcomer tries to reassure you.“They cannot take your soul.”

You plug your ears, you hold your tail close, but you still hear the old-timer's taunts. “Your pretty ears and your fine tail. They’ll use you for parts. And your corpse will make their lilium.” You still hear his skull splinter; hear blood drip, drip, gush. You tell yourself that his words, his deeds are only that. They do not predict your fate.

You listen to her. “Open, open, open, _open_.”

********

You are fox. Smart and subtle.

The door opens. Your time has come. You shut your eyes tight, but you still see him: the boy. His prayers unanswered because there are no gods here, because the gods want this. You have ceased to wonder. His head, severed from his spine, rests on a table. You will always remember. His giant, unseeing eye.

The floor abrades your tail and ears, flays the skin from your elbows and shins. You plead and wrap your hands around the collar, even as you know it cannot matter. In mere minutes it will begin. The pain that will only end with death.

“You’re going to take me. You disgusting, miserable, filthy pig.”

But there is the angry girl – commanding attention, demanding to be filled from the outside in with bolts of electricity, enough to drop her to the floor where she lies, stunned. Where she writhes and shouts for more.

You feel it before you see it. The teeth around your neck – gone. You smell it before you see it – the geysers of blood. You hear it before you see it – rock meeting bone meeting brain.

You see it. The doors blown open, the collars banished. The bad woman, with her lust for others' pain, now only skewered meat. The angry girl, purple mist wafting from her skin, somehow not dead. The angry girl who saved her, who saved all of them with her mind. 

“Aren’t you coming with us,” she is asked.

“I’m not trying to escape,” she replies.

All of them - the blue bear, the winged girl, the women with the weapons and the one armed man; the Cyclops who has kept her head and the skittish lizard - turn left. They move towards the tunnels that merge into the Old City sewers.

“What about her? She _saved_ us,” you remind them, tremulous and uncertain. In your head, it is a command. “We will repay her. We will save her.” Out loud you hear only a squeak, an irresolute challenge.

“I don't know that. And even if she did, if she doesn't want to leave there’s nothing to be done.” With barely a shrug, they dismiss you.

You should grab a gun and a cudgel and join them. You should abandon your savior and run for your miserable life, knowing there’s almost no chance you’ll make it out. Knowing that if by some miracle you escape this fortress, there is nowhere you can go, nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide. You should do it because fear is so much stronger than thought. 

But you are fox. You hesitate and consider.

You are weary of fear, that your short life is made up only of this. _Today is a good day because I did not die. Because yesterday I ate a crust of bread and tomorrow I might eat grass. Because today someone spat in my face and it tasted like rain. Because today I lost only a finger and tomorrow might keep my head._

The room empties and echoes. It tingles across the tips of your ears. Your eyes water, your nostrils flare. You inhale a heady scent: the energy that simmers behind her eyes, that ripples between her hollow ribs, that ghosts around her stump. Dark and strong and _hungry._

********

Here is a story you might one day tell. To your mother when ( _when, when_ ) you see her; to strangers and friends alike. Their bellies are round, but not echoing from hunger; their bellies are round and gurgling with plenty. They are resplendent in the crackling light - the warmth, the safety of nighttime fires.

Here is a story you might one day tell to a roomful of cubs in a classroom, like the cats do with their kittens; but yours will sit on the floor in a happy circle, no stern pointer or sharp knuckled ruler needed to maintain order, to impart wisdom.

This is what you would say.

In the fortress’ dungeon, you saw the angry girl rise from the floor. Even after her ordeal, focused and strong. There was no fat on her, but neither was she wasted. Her muscles were held high and tight to the bone.

She walked toward a wall of guns and you saw it. Ancient and imperious. _Hungry._ Like the shadows that ring your eyes you saw it. The lolling tongue. The ravenous, remote eyes. As if her ribs were showing and her hair was matted, as if she ate her fingernails one by one, day by day, to fend off starvation.

You hid behind a wall and watched her leave. You had no time, only a moment. But that was all you needed. Because you are fox. Cunning and quick. Because you felt it not just in your bones, but in your very marrow, in your guts to the depths of your soul. That she was special.

You noticed. The angry girl, who killed and liked it. She was not tired or scared. She was overflowing with righteous fury. She was death. But to _them_ , not to you.

You noticed. She was young and foolish. Crude and crusading. Heedless and too willing to die. Yet she acted with purpose, with reason, even if they were a purpose and reason you could not yet see the bottom of. Why else did she willingly come to the Cumaea? Why else did she court death?

You realized. This girl, she would not simply protect you, help you survive, she would give you something to live for. She was worth giving her loyalty too.

You understood. That she needed you. Needed a fox to steady her, to show her what could be accomplished if she were more than one. Needed someone (needed you) to sniff for danger, to meekly suggest: _Yes, of course, but have you also considered._ Needed someone to prove to her that two were better than one.

In the beginning she didn’t see it. She couldn't comprehend that you were capable of helping her as much as she was capable of helping you.

With time, she believed. You made sure she did. Because you are fox. You know a good deal when you see one. And Maika is half wolf. She is more clever than she seems.

So you raced down the hall on quiet feet. Towards the sounds of screaming.

**Author's Note:**

> Is Kippa this knowledgeable from the very beginning? Probably not. But I was struck, when re-reading Volume 1, by her decision to join Maika. I wanted to play around with the thought process that got her there, how she might look back on it. As well as make lots of fun fox comparisons. 
> 
> Dialogue in quotes comes from _Monstress, Volume 1_.


End file.
